[Tlc] FW: Calling the shots in Thailand

[Michael Montesano]

-----Original Message-----
Calling the shots in Thailand
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
15 August 2007
By Amy Kazmin
In the middle of harvesting thelamyai fruit that provides her family
with its primary income, Piyathida Yawira, a 33-year-old Thai farmer,
recently received a 194-page draft constitution in the mail. The bright
yellow booklet came from Thailand's military-installed government, which
is urging voters to endorse the charter in a national referendum on
Sunday. 
With just a primary education, Ms Piyathida - who was dismayed at the
army's removal last year of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime
minister - has struggled to work out what the constitution means for her
village in northern Thailand. "It's not easy to understand the official
language - it takes a lot of time and we are very busy now collecting
the fruit," she says. But state-controlled television and radio stations
have persuaded Ms Piyathida she should support the charter because "the
people will get more freedoms".
Besides that, she and others in this former stronghold of Mr Thaksin's
Thai Rak Thai (Thais love Thais) party fear the consequences of
rejecting the charter - anxieties the military has stoked deliberately
with ambiguous warnings about what would follow a No vote. "We are
afraid that political problems will spread into the village," says Ms
Piyathida. "We don't want any confrontation with a mob. We don't want
people to have any conflict. We just want the political problems to get
over with as soon as possible."
Indeed, by playing on public fears of chaos and hopes for an end to
military rule, Thailand's army hopes on Sunday to clear one of the big
hurdles to its ambitious project of re-ordering the country's public
life. In an unprecedented national referendum, the military aims to
secure public endorsement of a new system in which civil servants and
officials, including in the army, will once again have primacy over
elected politicians in civic affairs.
It is a charter that many politicians, social activists and liberal
academics see as a setback for Thailand's democracy, taking the country
back to an era when unelected, unaccountable elites held sway over
politics. In their push to get the charter through, the
military-installed government has restricted public expressions of
opposition to the draft. "The country has been held hostage since the
coup," says Sunai Phasuk, a Bangkok-based political analyst for Human
Rights Watch. "The message is: 'If you want a return to normality, than
accept the constitution,' which in a way means you are legitimising the
coup."
The army has promised that adoption of the new constitution will be
swiftly followed by a restoration of democracy, with multi-party
elections and then power transferred to an elected government. But many
political analysts say the system laid out in the army-sponsored charter
will be a "managed democracy" in which no single party can gain
sufficient power to rule alone, leaving room for top army figures, elite
bureaucrats and those close to the palace to exert influence behind the
scenes. "Thailand will have an election, and it will look like
democracy, but ultimately the military will try to call the shots," Mr
Sunai says.
Chris Baker, who has written on Thai history, politics and economics,
says the aim of the new charter is to prevent rural and urban poor
voters - who make up about two-thirds of the electorate and staunchly
supported Mr Thaksin - from enforcing their claim on state resources and
power. "You have a democratic framework, but the way power is
distributed, it will not allow the mass of the people in the electorate
to make their numbers felt," he says.
Yet even more worrying to many Thais than the re-engineering of the
constitution is the military's push to adopt a draconian internal
security law that would give the army sweeping powers to replace any
government official it deems 'obstructive' to national security. Mr
Sunai says the law, if adopted, would amount to a "silent coup",
allowing the military to control any of the levers of state power should
it wish. The law would also allow the army to abrogate most of the
rights enshrined in the draft charter, rendering its constitutional
guarantees meaningless.
In the face of heavy criticism, the army has soft-pedalled the
controversial security legislation in recent weeks. But many human
rights activists and academics worry that the military will try to push
the law through its hand-picked national legislative assembly before
transferring power to an elected government. "We are really afraid that
they will push this act forward," says Somchai Homla-or, a prominent
human rights lawyer. "That would be most dangerous. You will have a
shadow government - the military - over the elected government."
For much of Thailand's modern history, the army - with tacit backing
from the monarchy and elite bureaucrats - dominated public life and
policymaking, justifying its role as necessary in the face of a
persistent communist threat. Parliament was filled with small parties in
fractious coalitions that frequently ceded power to unelected military
leaders and had little real policy-making role.
But after a 1991 military coup against an elected government triggered
mass protests - and eventually led to horrific bloodshed as soldiers
fired into unarmed crowds - the army was forced, chastened, back to the
barracks for what many Thais believed would be the last time. In 1997 -
when the Asian financial crisis exposed deep flaws in Thai governance,
Bangkok adopted a reformist constitution - the so-called "People's
Charter" - designed to strengthen political parties and elected
governments, provide checks and balances on those in power, empower
independent regulators, strengthen civil rights protections and give
citizens a greater say in policymaking.
Yet the 1997 charter allowed Mr Thaksin - a media-savvy
telecommunications tycoon - to consolidate power to a degree
unprecedented in an elected Thai leader. Populist policies such as a
low-cost healthcare scheme won him strong support from the
long-neglected rural and urban poor majority, which handed him massive
electoral victories in 2001 and again in 2005.
Traditional elites were sidelined, while the middle classes fumed at
their growing tax burden and Mr Thaksin's aggressiveness towards
critics. The armed forces were particular losers, as military spending
plunged from 19 per cent of the government budget in 1991 to a mere 6
per cent in 2006. So when the Shinawatra family's controversial $1.9bn
sale of their telecoms empire triggered mass protests by already
resentful Bangkok residents, the military seized the chance to strike
back, grabbing power on September 19 in a bloodless coup that was widely
applauded by Bangkok's elite and middle classes.
Since then, the army has worked feverishly to reclaim the prerogatives
of its political heyday. The military-installed cabinet has hiked
defence spending by 66 per cent since the coup, increasing military
spending to 9 per cent of the total budget. Army officers have
re-installed themselves on the boards of state enterprises,
traditionally lucrative sinecures and sources of patronage and
corruption. 
>From his London exile, Mr Thaksin told the FT in a recent interview that
the new constitution was the "fruit of a poisoned tree" and an act of
"political revenge", crafted to prevent him from ever returning to
power. Yet analysts say the charter was designed as a bulwark not just
against Mr Thaksin but also against what he represented: the challenge
by elected politicians to bureaucratic and military elites. "There is a
clear project - you cannot allow electoral democracy to dominate because
it will empower the big rural-urban mass," Mr Baker says. "You can then
ignore the old elite, ignore the middle class, ignore the military and
go your own way."
Superficially, the new constitution seems to make it easier for Thai
citizens to propose legislation and call officials to account. But in
reality, activists and analysts say, it bolsters bureaucratic authority,
including that of the judiciary, which will ultimately determine the
fate of any citizen initiatives. Half the members of the new upper house
of parliament will be judicial appointees, expected to be military
officers and ex-bureaucrats, who will serve, in the words of Thai
academic Pasuk Pongpaichit, as a "conservative dead weight" on
progressive reforms. The electoral system for the lower house - with its
return to vast, multi-member parliamentary constituencies instead of
smaller single-member constituencies - will also weaken links between
elected representatives and their constituents.
The charter also lays down a wide array of policies that all governments
must follow - including requirements to provide the military with
"adequate" levels of "modern" weapons while otherwise ensuring that
fiscal and economic policy adheres to King Bhumibol Adulyadej's
"sufficiency economy" theory, which emphasises restraint and moderation.
Chaturon Chaiseng, a student democracy activist during the 1970s and
former deputy prime minister in Mr Thaksin's government, says the
charter's elaborate public policy prescriptions will leave little room
for innovation and competition among political parties. "These policies
might look good for now but in principle, you should let people make a
decision through the electoral system." 
Even then, economic analysts fret that the unstable coalition
governments likely to emerge under the new system will struggle with
coherent, decisive policymaking at a crucial juncture, when Thailand's
competitiveness in low-wage industries is declining. "Just imagine an
unpopular policy which nonetheless needs to get pushed through," says
one foreign business analyst, who asked not to be identified. "It will
definitely slow things down."
Yet the adoption of the new constitution may not be sufficient to secure
the army's primacy or restore genuine long-term political stability.
Even with Thai Rak Thai dissolved - and 111 of its leaders, including Mr
Thaksin - banned from politics for five years, few Thais believe their
deposed former premier will be satisfied merely amusing himself
improving the prospects of Manchester City, the English football team
that he acquired this summer.
While this week's Thai court warrant for Mr Thaksin's arrest will
probably deter any thought he may have of physical return to the
country, many of the dissolved party's former MPs are still loyal to Mr
Thaksin and remain a cohesive group. They are planning to tap into Thai
Rak Thai's residual popularity to contest the next elections together
under a new party banner. 
To counter this potentially potent electoral threat, the army itself is
gearing up to support its own party, with Gen Sonthi Boonyaratkalin, the
army chief and coup leader, still apparently considering running as a
candidate. Besides that, analysts predict the military-installed
government will try to thwart the Thai Rak Thai successor party while
boosting its rivals' prospects.
Yet such tactics could result in a fresh outpouring of public resentment
from those who already feel disenfranchised by the coup. "You basically
have Thailand polarised between the past and the future," says Thitinan
Pongsudhirak, a Chulalongkorn University political scientist. "The past
is bureaucratic elitism...and the future is more mass driven electoral
outcomes."
"Thaksin exposed and promoted mass politics - he provided people
opportunities, hopes and dreams," he says. "Now the elites are trying to
shut that down. But in the long term, I don't think they can do it."